Evelyn Lau

Address: Plaque is on lamppost along the seawall at the end of Davie St. at Marinaside, at the south end of the traffic circle.

Photo credit: Barry Peterson and Blaise Enright

Location: Plaque is on lamppost along the seawall at the end of Davie St. at Marinaside, at the south end of the traffic circle.

Evelyn Lau walks this stretch of seawall several times a week, often composing poems, including “Quayside”.

The bed of crushed mussel shells, bruise-black,
the silent glide of the scarlet freighter,
the wind slapping my face awake
to the world somersaulting blue and brazen –
I am gulping the air flavoured with metal and shellfish,
stretching to take it in, salt sting, sea grass,
gold pollen detonating in the breeze, the profusion
of it, this life you returned to me, this one life.

From Quayside

Born Evelyn Yee-Fun Lau in 1971, she received the Pat Lowther Award from the League of Canadian Poets for best book of poetry by a woman in Canada, for Living Under Plastic, containing “Quayside”, in 2011, the same year she was named City of Vancouver’s Poet Laureate. As a fourteen year-old honour student, Lau had run away from her restrictive upbringing to survive for two years as a teenage prostitute and drug user. Her teenage memoir Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, received much publicity and became a CBC movie.

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Born Evelyn Yee-Fun Lau in 1971, she received the Pat Lowther Award from the League of Canadian Poets for best book of poetry by a woman in Canada, for Living Under Plastic, containing Quayside, in 2011, the same year she was named City of Vancouver’s Poet Laureate. As a fourteenyear- old honour student, Lau had run away from her restrictive upbringing to survive for two years as a teenage prostitute and drug user. Her teenage memoir Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, received much publicity and became a CBC movie.

The bed of crushed mussel shells, bruise-black,
the silent glide of the scarlet freighter,
the wind slapping my face awake
to the world somersaulting blue and brazen –
I am gulping the air flavoured with metal and shellfish,
stretching to take it in, salt sting, sea grass,
gold pollen detonating in the breeze, the profusion
of it, this life you returned to me, this one life.